Talk:Nyx (Warframe)/@comment-25025740-20150713040806
Can we savor a moment to appreciate the brutality of Nyx's Mind Control? It's so cool. I'm gonna write about it. Syd Andarr pushes his hands into his Dera rifle, feels the radiant warmth from the heated plasma waiting within. He kneels behind one of the dull orange storage crates—the ones pecked over the frosted outskirts like scattered feed and cycled in the Corpus interior like silicon plating—and steals a glance through his helmet at the soldier next to him, the plasma in his gun waiting too. He isn’t much. The soldier by Syd is scrawny, and his sunset-colored suit stumbles over him like a blanket. He is built for coding and computation, not handling the weight of a gun and the approach of an enemy, and Syd sees unease bite itself through the soldier in his tight fingers and strained back. He sees the tension ventilating through the rest of the soldiers down the corridor like a muscular toxin, they and their guns all waiting, looking at everything and looking at nothing. The waiting tears at Syd’s flesh, but he tries to negate it. He has never seen a Tenno come this far, he tells himself. Security is too high and personnel are too trained, and they will never allow the mutated terrorists to reach the reactor which he protects. These words repeat themselves in Syd’s mind, and he syncs them to his manual breathing. Syd glances at the soldier again and feels the clench of sympathy. Syd wishes for him to be back in a lab as much as he does. The radio in his helmet hums quietly, blissful, unaware of the danger, and as Syd reels in a nervous breath he envies it. Then: “Come in, corridors Four-A through Six-H.” The radio whirrs in the air like sudden wind and the soldiers stir as they fasten their ears to it. “Fourth Tenno in alleged Trinity-style Warframe has been confirmed inoperable. All known units contained.” Furious peace and laughing relief drops upon the soldiers like electric grenades. Some of the soldiers cheer, and a lumbering Tech claps meaty gloves together and nods, his Supra hanging like a stone on its strap. Syd pats the small soldier on his back and looks at him, retracting his visor. “Look at that, warrior. We don’t have to fight today.” He says this with a truthful smile, and the small one chuckles back with childlike joy. “A w-wonderful day, indeed.” Syd toggles the transmitter on his radio. “Great news, guys. Thanks for the report, and tear those Tenno apart for me. Cheers from corridor Five-W!” Then he stops, and he waits, but the man does not respond. His congratulations hang in the air and stare back at all who cast an awkward gaze. “This is corridor Five-W, does anybody copy?” Again, the words hang. “Tenno could’ve ruptured communication lines before we killed ’em,” says the Tech, his voice an earthen rumble. Syd nods, slowly. He pains to see the nervousness shroud itself into the small soldier again. “That could’ve happened, I—” The carbon plating in the Tech’s helmet punches inward and crushes his skull with the sound of a bullet. Blood funnels out of the gap as he topples, voiceless. The metal door at the corridor’s end is open like a hellish mouth. The small soldier screams. Syd brings his Dera close to his shoulder, closing his mask on it like an old friend as his body works for him. He sees the shape—tall and slender and grey, a splash of blue-green around the armor of her shoulders—sprinting down the aisle, flinging stars from her pockets, emotions concealed in her featureless, curve-topped mask. The stars cut clean through the suits of the crewmen and Syd sees them keel onto the floor, grabbing their stomachs, or they crash into their helmets until they rupture and sever off their skulls. Syd watches the plasma sail out of his rifle and, instinct clouding victory, applauds a shot as it clambers into the demon’s shoulder. It spills over her like blue water, harmless, and she looks at him. It is only a gaze. Syd knows it is only a gaze. But there is magic, he sees, in the way she cranes forward, as though she grapples for him down the walls, begging for him, pleading for him, crying to be understood. Then, Syd wants to be caught. Syd turns to the small soldier, being brave and firing small shots at the creature, with his small gun behind his small cover. Syd clubs him over the head with the butt of his rifle, and, as the boy tumbles over to see him, fires plasma into his mouth. The soldier’s face melts inward, exposing smoking teeth and a collapsing jaw, but Syd looks away. He is uninterested. He wants to see the creature, this misunderstood angel, and he craves her recognition. She lay some ten meters away, slipping a knife under a crewman’s throat and sticking more of her beautiful stars into the chest of another, and he realizes she heeds none of his existence. That is alright, Syd says to himself. The creature is busy with her misunderstood religion. He can be recognized in the grace of her deadly arms and the poise of her deadly legs. Syd cooks a grenade and throws it erupting to a crewman with a Lanka. The man’s limbs are thrown around the room. The explosion knocks some men around the creature to their feet, and in their bleeding agony she pauses and looks at him again. Her face is a song. She crouches and bolts over and Syd brims with elation, but his body does not express it. He waits, as she places one celestial hand on his shoulder and tilts her head a bit sideways, inspecting him like a wondrous predator before an unworthy meal. She takes her knife and slices open his stomach, and Syd feels his organs loosen but stay in place with her holy power. She runs off, vanishing forward, and Syd looks around and finds himself alone. Bodies lie around him, thrown over cover and cracked against walls, but he does not set down his gun, in fear more of them come. A drop of blood, in this new silence, resounds with a sharp smack on the floor and Syd cranes his head downward to look at it. It leaks from his wound. He sees the incision in his flesh yawn open like a blooming rose, and as more of his blood leaks out, more of this blissful devotion fades. Pain—fanged, ruthless pain—starts to gnaw at him, and he drops thudding to his knees as his rifle clatters across the floor. The creature’s divinity fades and Syd registers her again as a Tenno, the terrorists, and as the pain in his stomach kicks him choking on his hands, he sees the small soldier with the melted face, innocent and calm. His throat is too swollen with blood to speak, but before death envelops him, Syd finds a final thought. What have I done?